The Last Temptation of Integra
by Stray
Summary: following after the last episode of the anime. Title is descriptive enough. Oneshot, no pairing. Not betaed yet.


The Last Temptation of Integra

By Stray

Rating: PG

Disclaimer: Hellsing is no property of mine and I recieve no payment above the knowledge that there were a few people who enjoyed reading it.

Warning: darkness and blood.

………

She wanted to die. Die while she was still a human. She looked around her desperately to find something. Something to end her life with until it was too late. That filthy blood! She must get rid of it! All of it! A knife! A scrap of glass! Anything!

She looked around. There was a body lying in her prison cell, face down and unmoving. It was dead. Not that being dead had prevented it from moving before it ended up in its current state. It was completely drained from its blood and not prone to walk the land of the living again. Or the unliving for that case.

Integra bit her lips in anxiousness. There was nothing the like! It was a cell, damn it! Of course they didn't leave anything that she could use as a weapon against the guards. She felt an undeniable desire to burst out in a mad laugh. How ironic! And she did so, apparently, shocked by the loudness of her own voice. She sounded crazy! Truthfully crazy!

She remembered waking from her shallow sleep in the middle of the night - she had not been able to tell if it had been night, because there were no windows on the walls of her chamber. But she had been able to tell that it couldn't have been day out there, because the form that had materialized next to her cot had been a creature of the night. She had given up on faking sleep. She had known, the thing had been able to sense she had been awake. Just like it had been able to sense the life in her body. And she had immediately known that this time she had had no chance against the foul creature.

The speed of the movement had been beyond her ability of perception. In one moment she had been lying on the hard surface of her mattress and in the next she was trapped against a body of the hardness and coldness of white marble, held firmly by arms with the strength of steel wires. The only thought that had slipped into her mind was that she had been betrayed.

…The enemy had succeeded to bring her down in an intricate plot. Then she had been betrayed by her former comrades in arms, who had been more inclined to believe in that they saw then her word, and finally put her into this place. Both sides had wanted her gone. Now she was not only betrayed but sold out too. There had been no chance for the Freak to get through the sacred wards and the protective care of her own servant, the Vampire. At last he too had betrayed her. And she couldn't have blamed him. She wasn't worthy of his loyalty, having been so week like she had become. Allowing them keep her here.

The penetrating hadn't been so bad; it had barely hurt. But in the next instant a force that had been stronger and fiercer than anything she had ever felt before started to suck out the life of her body. Her heart had been fluttering in her chest like it had wanted out desperately, and an icy coldness had overtaken her limbs that in contrast were nearly numb. She wondered if it had been like that to give up.

But giving up - she had never done before. Not even when apart form a few survivors nearly all of her men were killed, her family home and head quarters half blown up, half smeared with blood of her own soldiers and a feasting place for ghouls. She hadn't given up when she had heard the announcement about her troops assumedly having been attacked the place she had wanted to protect and purge. She hadn't given up when she had been locked up here in this underground cellar with no daylight and no visible prospects for release.

She hadn't been brought up to give up! Ever!

It had been more a misguided instinct of self-preservation then a conscious action. She didn't know how she had been able to fight back, but fact was that she had managed somehow. She had managed somehow - to rip open the hard skin of her predator with her - teeth? Nails? She hadn't known. And the next instant she had latched her mouth on the open wound and let the sticky, cold, metallic tasting but powerful fluid gush down her throat. Her fingers curved into a grip on her attacker that now had wanted to flee, but hadn't been able to. She had held it firmly in a solid hold that had grown immensely stronger. The power given to her by the first taste of the creature's inhuman blood and the desperate need to fill her vacated arteries with life had given her strength exceeding that of the creature. And the will that she would never give up.

It had been over before she had realized what she had done. The carcass of the creature sliding bonelessly onto the ground at her feet, having been slipped out of her loosened grasp. The freezing coldness, that had invaded her entrails, had crept all over inside her body, had filled her vessels with something, not quite life, but a sick imitation of it - an imitation that felt thousand times more real. It had power and energy. And now it wanted control. Control over her mind and body. But that was something, she wouldn't allow!

She would never give up on control, whatever the price may be!

She felt a burning, itching pain in her mouth and lifting her hand to it she touched something lukewarm and wet. Looking at her fingers she realized that it was blood. Her own blood - warmed up a little by her slowly cooling flesh - as she bit her lips in desperateness.

But it wasn't right somehow. She hadn't bitten down that hard…

She lifted her own fingers to her mouth again, pushing back the supple flesh of her lips to bare her teeth in a bewildered grimace, that looked like the snare of an animal. She touched her teeth and froze in shock. It had begun already, … she traced fangs instead.

She felt her face paling when panic slowly crept over her; trembling fingers still fumbling at her newly grown fangs, tracing out the needle-sharp end of it. She felt a helpless tear flowing down her cheek. "It's pathetic!" she spat in anger and as she sneered, she bit accidentally at her finger.

Searing pain. She looked at it and saw crimson blood flowing down her tilted finger. A crimson so vibrant and sharp, she had never seen before. She had a sudden, maddening urge to taste that blood, but she forced her will against it and won over the arising Beast inside her. 'There is no time!' she thought considering how hard it was to maintain her control.

At the very sight of blood. Her blood…

At that moment her eyes widened and her face lit up in realization.

Determined she moved her bitten finger - blood still flowing from the wound that had already begun to heal with supernatural speed - and lifted her shaky wrist to her mouth intending to bite her vein. To use her own vampiric fangs as a weapon she searched for so desperately just a few seconds earlier.

She enabled herself a confident, victorious smile. She - Integra Windgates Hellsing - was going to win over the filthy vermin of undead desire! She is going to fulfill her holy obligation to rid her country from the dirt, godless creatures - including herself!

She brushed her lips against the tender skin of her wrist and felt the irregular, weak pulsation of her lifeblood. Her heart hasn't stopped yet - she realized. But it was jus about to. Were she still a mere human, she would have been collapsed from pain and hurt. But she didn't even feel dizzy because the rhapsodic beating of her heart.

'Interesting…' she thought. As she was contemplating about the unnatural vividness of her flesh she snapped abruptly. 'No!' she was shouting at herself mentally. She had to concentrate on her duty! There was no time! - she reminded herself.

An animal snarl contorted her handsome features, as she prepared to thrust her fangs into her nigh undead flesh, ripping the artery open to empty out all the filthy blood from her defiled body onto the stone floor of her chamber, to make her veins dry out like the Sahara!

She felt the pulse and found herself hypnotized by it. She HEARD it, like loud tribal drums in the lush, untamed rainforests in the heart of Africa. She felt freed by the mesmerizing rhythm, like she would stand under the endless, starry sky somewhere in the nature breathing in clear air bearing the intoxicatingly spicy aroma of all living, blood-filled creature in her surroundings.

'No!' she reprimanded weakly. She mustn't have those thoughts! She mustn't!

But she already hesitated.

Then drew back her wrist from her mouth.

Her determination to kill herself was fading and about to be replaced by another desire. An immeasurably stronger one. The desire to live. And taste… taste BLOOD.

It was the filth of the Beast in her, the temptation of the undead creature. The Abomination! The uncontrolled will to live, to feed, to experience everything possible without restraints of a mortal's limitations.

The regulation of morals.

The restrictions of conscinence.

The confines of duty.

Free to do everything she desired!

She felt herself giving in… Her will ebbing away… Losing control…

She hated herself for her weakness.

But the other side of her knew it was only a temporary condition. The remnant of her humanity.

She crossed her hands on her breast and froze for a moment in a perfect stare only a vampire is able to achieve.

She held her palm above her breast and felt the last beat of her heart. And then it stopped.

Her body cold. No flowing of body fluids. No drumming of life in her chest. And she felt an undeniable need to fill the silence with the sounds of a heart beating. Feel the energy of life again. The warmth of a living creature struggling against the solid coldness of her body. She could imagine these things so vividly, as she would have experienced them for millions of times.

Those memories weren't her own!

"Come out! I know you are here!" she yelled.

A red shadow took a shape in front of her. At the sight of the mad grin on his familiar (and yet alien, because she saw so much more with her vision than a mere mortal!) face in front of her, she felt the necessity to mimic it. The old - the living - Integra would have controlled herself, not giving in to the temptation. But she felt nothing like her former self now.

"I hope, you are satisfied now!" she grinned at Alucard.

"Not at all!" the low murmur echoed on the empty walls of the prison cell. "You should have been mine to take!"

For a minute Integra was bluffed at the daring bluntness of his 'pet vampire'. But then as she realized what term she used to name his undead servant, in the instant she understood that she wasn't a human anymore. Why should she be concerned by human emotions like useless pride and pricked ego? She knew with an undeniable being finality that Alucard was her servant, and in the end it was the only thing that counted considering him. She shrugged and grinned, already adjusted to the lightheaded, half-insane attitude that derived from being an immortal creature with no limits.

"But I belong to myself alone, not like you, Alucard." She snickered a little at her own joke and turned away. "Now you take me out of here!" she commanded without any doubt that her command is going to be carried out.

She was the Master. And she wasn't weak anymore.

Fin


End file.
